An Open Letter

Dear Representative Stupak:

Well, you have come out, forcefully, against the latest version of Congressional Health Care Sausage, by stating that you will not vote for the bill that might allow reconciliation of the House and Senate versions, and so produce at long last a giant step along the road to health care reform.

Your opposition is principled: the Senate bill (which the House would pass, under the current plan) provides for a taxpayer subsidy of abortion; at least, you think it does. You oppose abortion. End of story; end of debate.

I believe your position represents the greatest single threat to the continued prosperity of American democracy. That's right: greater than the "socialism" that is so feared by the wingnuts, greater than the moral hazard risk that the financial machinations of the past year have produced, greater even than the destructive, anti-democratic United States Senate and its cloture rules.*

Don't get me wrong: I am all for principle. I believe we should all live our lives according to our principles. Unfortunately, you seem to want to force me to live my life according to your principles, which is coercive beyond any concept that can be reconciled with American democracy.

My principles include an opposition to war. Also, an opposition to killing other human beings.

Other citizens have principled objections to the teaching of evolution in public schools, to the lack of religious symbols in public places, to divorce, to the charging of interest, to the eating of pork, to gay marriage or any gay association at all (indeed, it appears that some Americans have supported an effort to make homosexual association in Uganda punishable by death). We are a diverse country; we have diverse views. Normal citizens advocate their views in the public sphere according to their preferences.

Unfortunately, I cannot affect, in significant fashion, the fact that the United States participates in war, or that it devotes nearly a trillion dollars per year to its military establishment. I cannot even effectively prevent the U.S., and its states, from executing those convicted of certain crimes; even in the face of strong evidence that innocent people are still being executed in this country, I have no effective way of stopping that. I could, of course, go to great lengths personally to state my principled objections, and to publicize my views. I could write letters; and if I were persistent enough or lucky enough or rich enough, I could perhaps have my own newspaper or television program to use as a forum for this. Hell, if I were rich enough, I could buy a seat in the Congress and vote for the abolition of those things I find objectionable.

But more realistically, I could refuse, as some have done, to pay the portion of my federal income tax bill that is devoted to the military. I could chain myself to the death house fence at some state prison.

I could, in other words, take a serious personal risk, and accept the consequences, in order to assert my principles and avoid violating them even by proxy. I could go to jail to advance my cause.

Not you. You don't have to worry about personal risk: the expression of your principles comes cheap, by virtue of your position. Your big risk, I suppose, is that you might calculate incorrectly and lose an election. If you offend enough people in Washington, you might get a crappy office and less-desirable committee assignments.

I am sure that it is only a matter of time until your example prompts some red state congressman to vote against some funding bill because it threatens some child, somewhere, with exposure to a federally-financed discussion of evolution. Or perhaps some senator has a principled objection to the use of the term "Civil War" to describe The War Between The States. We can't have federal funds paying for that, can we? Or, if we oppose gay marriage, let's ban the use of federal funds to pay for the courts in Washington, D.C., now that it has legalized the practice.

You are prepared to use your opposition to something that is legal as a club with which to push your view to the detriment of us all. And there is absolutely no difference between your principled stance and a similar stance by a congressman who holds one of the other principled views mentioned above: I know it's legal, but I don't like it; so, to prevent it, I will do damage to efforts to address some other widely-perceived need.

Fine; go ahead. You are a poster child for the balkanization of American politics. If you have your way, then the Congress will do nothing. Not because nothing is needed; but because there will always be a single individual, or a small group of individuals, who happen to have the power to rob us all, to thwart our expressed ideals and goals.

In the name of principle.



*I am being precise here.

America's Army

You will be happy to learn, as was I, that version 3.0.7 of America's Army has corrected the annoying problem of weapons suddenly disappearing. In addition, grenades will now display properly, and the problem of killing oneself with a grenade has been fixed. They've even addressed the issue of player name-length!


Not that things are perfect, as one "Phoenix" posted on the AA3 blog: "Now just fix the part where I empty an entire clip into someone only to have him turn around and shoot once and kill me, and walk away without a scratch.." 


I know that would seriously upset my day.


What is this all about? Well, I must confess I came late to the subject, myself. "AA3" is, of course, the third (major) version of America's Army, a video game that is so good that it is used by the U.S. Army as a training exercise. One commentator said that, if you give the Army combat simulation training to an 18 year-old, he already knows most of it.


Video games make killing fun! And why shouldn't the ordinary foot-soldier enjoy the same convenience of killing by remote control that the pilots of drone aircraft get, sipping their coffee in Texas while destroying bad guys (and the occasional village) in Pakistan? what's the qualitative difference between killing on-screen and killing on-scene?


"Well, things aren't quite so antiseptic on a real battlefield," one reviewer cautioned. "And sometimes, in actual combat, you have to go tell your buddy's wife that his brains are scattered over some mountainside and he won't be coming home."


Bummer. Where's the reset button?